Today we’re going to talk about D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die. It’s hard to know where to even begin.

Its full title is technically D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die – Season One. There will never be a Season Two.

D4 was directed and written by Hidetaka Suehiro, or Swery65, the man behind games like Deadly Premonition. It was developed by Access Games and published by Microsoft for Xbox One and PC. Season One contains the prologue and first two episodes, and Season Two was meant to continue it. But when Swery65 left Access Games, any chance of seeing Season Two vanished.

What’s left is a partial murder mystery with no solid answers and a cliffhanger ending, but while that means it doesn’t provide a lot of satisfaction plot-wise, it’s still worth playing for how utterly weird it is.

You play David Young, a detective whose wife was murdered under mysterious circumstances, leaving him with only her final words, “Look for D.” He can’t remember anything else that happened that night, but he gained the ability to travel back in time using certain key objects called mementos. By doing so, he hopes to learn the identity of “D” and possibly even undo his wife’s death.

The controls are very strange, most likely because it was designed for Kinect controls. You click certain areas to walk and click things in the environment to investigate them, but many actions are handled through motion – click a door and then swipe the cursor to the side to open it, grab a cup and swipe up to drink, click key spots during a fight to avoid taking damage, etc.

Everything you do costs stamina, which you can restore by eating food. Food you’ve eaten is recorded like a collectible, along with all the documents you can read and other interactions. If you really want every piece of lore and story, you’ll spend a lot of time in David’s house opening drawers, checking out books, and stumbling across memories of his wife, which gives it an almost slice-of-life feel when you aren’t back in time gathering clues. There are even small “side cases” that range from having dinner to taking a quiz on airplanes.

None of this is why I called it weird, by the way.

D4’s weirdness is hard to explain. If you’ve played Deadly Premonition, you probably have an idea of how weird it could be, but magnify that even further. Every second of D4 feels like insanity. It really is impossible to describe in words.

Fortunately, I’ve found some videos online.

I think that says it all.

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with D4: Dark Dreams Don’t Die – Season One, a surreal adventure game experience where anything could happen and be treated as normal and you never quite know what to expect.

While I’ve highlighted the weirder aspects here, I should also mention that the overarching mystery was pretty intriguing and I’d love to know what it was building up to. It’s a shame we’ll likely never get to see Season Two, but at least Season One still exists as a curious relic of what could have been.